The Yarlung-Tsangpo River in southern Asia drops rapidly through the Himalaya Mountains on its way to the Bay of Bengal, losing about 7,000 feet of elevation through the precipitously steep Tsangpo Gorge.

For the first time, scientists have direct geochemical evidence that the 150-mile long gorge, possibly the world's deepest, was the conduit by which megafloods from glacial lakes, perhaps half the volume of Lake Erie, drained suddenly and catastrophically through the Himalayas when their ice dams failed at times during the last 2 million years...

In this case, the water moved rapidly through bedrock gorge, carving away the base of slopes so steep they already were near the failure threshold. Because the riverbed through the Tsangpo Gorge is essentially bedrock and the slope is so steep and narrow, the deep flood waters could build enormous speed and erosive power.

As the base of the slopes eroded, areas higher on the bedrock hillsides tumbled into the channel, freeing microscopic grains of zircon that were carried out of the gorge by the fast-moving water and deposited downstream.

Uranium-bearing zircon grains carry a sort of geochemical signature for the place where they originated, so grains found downstream can be traced back to the rocks from which they eroded. Lang found that normal annual river flow carries about 40 percent of the grains from the Tsangpo Gorge downstream. But grains from the gorge found in prehistoric megaflood deposits make up as much as 80 percent of the total.

I have felt since seeing research that showed that erosive force is exponential with flood volume, not linear that it was the largest ~1% of floods on a river that did 50%+ of the erosion. Even saw a reference that todays Potomac river does no downcutting when below flood stage.

For the people that the Lord has chosen to believe in Him and in the redemptive work of Christ for their salvation, a trusting faith that all of His Word is true, including the Genesis flood, is no big stretch. For those who the Lord has chosen would not come to a believing, saving faith, you could show them a YouTube of the flood and they still wouldn’t believe.

patriotsblood: "you could show them a YouTube of the flood and they still wouldnt believe."

Science has identified many floods throughout the geological record. Any of those, if recorded on YouTube, would be accepted by believers and non-believers alike.

But science has never found evidence of a single Great Flood which covered the entire earth up to the level of Mount Ararat (Genesis 8:3-5) -- around 17,000 feet -- and then receded to current levels. Where scientifically, could such volumes of water have come from, or gone to? Even the great asteroid strike in the ocean near Chicxulib, Mexico, left no evidence of walls-of-water floods so high.

Fortunately, specific depths of flood waters are not important, even to verify the point of Noah's story, which is G*d's promise never to do it again. G*d promises that despite our sinfulness, while He may punish us for it, He will not destroy everything by flood. Some will survive, the world will go on...

Seems to me that's good to know, regardless of how high certain floodwaters may, or may not, have reached. :-)

It’s also curious that the oldest civilization in the Middle East — Egypt — has no flood story at all, despite the fact that the 4th dynasty’s Great Pyramid at Giza was built three hundred years before the literalist estimate for the date of the Noachian flood. The closest we get to an Egyptian flood story is the tale of Atlantis which Plato, writing as Socrates, claims came from Egypt via Solon.

16
posted on 07/28/2013 7:33:06 PM PDT
by SunkenCiv
(It's no coincidence that some "conservatives" echo the hard left.)

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